Fitting Tribute

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The air crew fashioned in bronze at the new RAF Bomber Command memorial unveiled by the Queen in Hyde Park yesterday were lucky men. They are depicted having just returned, exhausted yet intact, from a mission over wartime Europe.

Many of their comrades were not so fortunate. Almost half of the 125,000 airmen who flew with Bomber Command did not come home. Counting those wounded and captured, the casualty rate was 60 per cent, much higher even than that for infantry soldiers in the First World War. These young men, indeed mere boys in many cases, were supremely brave.